On and On
by lowriseflare
Summary: Neela hasn't actually slept at her place since she got here. Post-Season 15.


On Wednesdays he gets finished before her, so he's already got dinner started by the time she lets herself into his apartment. "Just burgers," he says, nodding toward the grill on the deck. "Too hot."

"You're not kidding," she says, dropping her bag on the carpet and flopping down onto the couch. A nice thing about Baton Rouge is that everywhere you go is violently air-conditioned, so that although the walk in from the car was enough to wilt her, goosebumps are already rising on her skin. Neela sighs with relief. "Hi."

"Hi." He grins at her over the arm of the sofa. "How was surgery?"

"Smashing, actually. Anterior temporal lobectomy on a teenage epileptic. Came through it like a dream."

"Anterior temporal lobectomy, huh?" He sprawls his lean body on top of her, his lips ghosting over her neck. "Sounds gory."

"Oh, it was."

They lie there and chat for awhile: how his day went, what's on TV tonight, whether the neighbor on the other side of the wall is serial killer or just _a weird dude_. She likes feeling his weight. Ray's hand creeps up beneath her scrub top, drawing idle circles there, tracing the underwire of her bra. She scrapes her fingernails over his close-cropped scalp. Neela loves this haircut. She cannot get over it. It actually struck her speechless for a moment in the hospital that first morning, his green-grey eyes enormous, like he was suddenly revealed.

Three weeks later and it's so normal as to be completely bizarre. He takes out the garbage. She sets the timer on the coffeemaker before they go to bed. Neela's spent the last two years fully believing they were doomed to each other's footnotes: one failure after another, her surgical gloves thrown to the floor in disgust. The sight of him brushing his teeth in the morning is oddly shocking. "What?" he asked the other day, when he caught her staring at him while he scrolled through the music channels on cable.

Neela shook her head, flustered. "Nothing."

"Weirdo."

"You are."

"Your mom is."

If you'd told her a year ago they'd ever speak to each other like this again, she'd have called up to psych for a consult. It feels like madness. At work they've commented on how quickly she's taking to Le Chatlier but with Ray she feels like her brain is sluggish, slow to make sense of the data it's taking in. She likes it, oh God, she likes it. It's just...a bit terrifying, that's all.

"I should drive over to my apartment after dinner," she tells him, glancing over the back of the couch at the clock on the stove. "Check the mailbox and what have you."

"Expecting that sex ramp you sent away for?"

"It's a swing, actually."

Ray nods appreciatively. "Nice."

Neela hasn't actually slept in in her place since she got here. She just...hasn't gotten to it. Those first few nights they were insane for each other, half-desperate and gasping: letting him out of her sight to do something as pedestrian as unpacking seemed completely out of the question. She thought things would calm down a bit once she started work, but the morning of her first shift he handed her a granola bar and said, "See you back here later?"

"Yes," she said, and it felt like something was blooming in her chest. "Absolutely."

Consequently her apartment is completely unlived in: a dumping ground for the detritus of her life here, littered with open suitcases and unshaded lamps. A lonely Ikea dinette sits in the middle of the living room. It looks a bit like a schizophrenic person lives there, frankly, and perhaps this weekend she should put some effort in, especially since Ray hasn't said anything about giving notice to her landlord. Which is fine. Neela supposes it's prudent to hang onto it in any case, an escape pod, a contingency plan.

It seemed very important, as she packed up her life in Chicago, to calculate for every possible permutation of her future.

He's pulling now at the drawstring on her scrubs, smoothing his palm over her belly; he slips his fingers inside her, and she bucks against his hand. Sometimes Neela is a little embarrassed by how eager she is for him, but the truth is she's never wanted someone like this in her life. His smell on the bed sheets, the pressure of his body behind her as he squeezes by in the kitchen: any petty contact is enough to drive her mad. They've already done it in her office, once, which she absolutely could never have fathomed with anyone else. She's never felt like she couldn't simply wait until she got home, but with Ray, she just--she can't be close enough. She wants to get inside his skin.

The burgers char, of course. They order a pizza. Neither of them mind.

*

They're so glued together these days you'd think he'd want some time by himself, but when Neela texts him to see if he has time to grab lunch he actually can't think of anybody else he'd rather eat with. It was like that when they were living together, too. Back when things were just getting weird, when he was randomly starting to notice shit like the beauty mark at the nape of her neck, Ray kept waiting to get tired of her company. Kept hoping he would, actually. And he just...never did. He thinks it's idiotic that she's paying for that crappy apartment, honestly, but he knows he got a huge yes when she came down here at all and he doesn't want to scare her off. If she needs a little space then she needs a little space, that's all. It's fine. She's always been that way.

He gives Bryan a heads up that he's going and meets Neela in the courtyard; it's hot, and she squints in the sunlight. There's perspiration on her neck. "I think I kind of like you," he tells her, when she catches him looking.

She steals a chip out of the bag on his lap. "I think I rather like you, too."

Neela doesn't need to scrub in until two, so she walks him back upstairs. Caroline is on today, blond ponytail swishing as she helps a little boy on the balance beam. Caroline was Ray's physical therapist back when he was learning how to walk and it's a wonder she still even talks to him, that's how hard he was concentrating on a being a dick to everyone he met. They had kind of a thing--not serious at all, and she's engaged now, actually--but he was such a train wreck, and she didn't hold it against him. He'll always owe her one for that.

She comes over and stands next to him as he watches Neela's dark form recede down the hallway. "So that's her, huh?" she asks.

The whole time they've known each other, Ray has never breathed a word about Neela to Caroline.

"Yeah," he says. "Thats her."

*

Ray plays poker with some guys he knows from rehab every couple of weeks, so after work on Tuesday Neela picks up some dinner and drives to her apartment. It's not far, but she's never made the trip from the hospital before so she gets on the highway by mistake and winds up spending half an hour lost in University Lakes. By the time she finds her complex she's cranky and at loose ends, that vague niggling panic settling in around the edges of her psyche.

The apartment is just as dismal as she left it the other night: all she needs to do is slit the couch cushions and it could pass as the set for a burglary reenactment on _Unsolved Mysteries_. Neela turns on all the lights and eats her salad standing up at the sink, then surveys the damage. Why did she ship so much _stuff_? It's overwhelming. Not to mention the fact that she was so distracted while she packed all this rubbish that it's like a bag lady did it, picture frames in boxes with her shower curtain and a block of knives she never uses. She must have been taking drugs. Finally she pulls the dock for her iPod out from underneath a stack of bath towels and puts on some Whitney Houston, which makes it feel marginally less dire in here. She puts some dishes in the cabinet, sheets on the bed; she thinks of hanging some photos, but decides against it. Finally she sits down on the floor and dials Abby in Boston. She calls Abby a lot these days, more than she ever did back in Chicago; hearing her voice helps Neela get her bearings in this strange, upside-down life, the way you run a hand along the wall in a dark room. "I hate unpacking," she says crabbily.

Abby laughs. Neela can hear pots clanging in the background, Joe chattering away. "You're not unpacked yet?"

"Not nearly. Remember how long I lived out of my suitcase when I moved in with you?" she asks. "My place is a wasteland. I've been staying every night at Ray's."

"Whoo-hoo," Abby says cheerfully. "Doctor Love. How's the sex?"

"Abby!"

"Oh, come on."

"It's." Neela stops, tries to think what to say. "It's very good."

"Bullshit. Don't you dare hold out on me. I'm a married, dried-up old crone. I have to take my jollies where I can get them."

"Well, what do you want to know, positions?"

"Oh, Jesus Christ. You're useless, you know that? Call me back when you have something to report."

That fuzzy sense of alarm turns near-hysterical: suddenly it is very important that Abby not hang up. "_Wait_."

"What?" Abby is worried, her voice rising an octave. "Neela, is something wrong?"

"No, no. It's just--" She stops. What _is_ it, exactly?

"Do you not like it there?" There's a pause, some shuffling. "You can tell me. I just closed myself in the pantry. Also, at some point we should talk about the fact that apparently I'm now the kind of person who has a pantry."

Neela laughs. She does like it here, actually. And nothing is wrong. In a lot of ways it's like it was when she and Ray were roommates: they rent a lot of movies. They bicker. They grocery shop in a meandering, counterproductive way, except that he does things like slip two fingers into the back of her jeans in the deli line, knuckles pressing into the small of her back, so--not exactly like it was when they were roommates. Bits of it are complicated, and small things break her heart: a wheelchair folded up in the back of the coat closet, a pharmacy's supply of antibiotics in the medicine chest. Neela still hates herself a little. Most of all she thought that coming here meant she was finished being scared to death all the time but it turns out, sorrowfully, that her blind animal fear isn't situational. She didn't leave it behind in Chicago, with her stethoscope and nametag; she packed it up in boxes and it crouches inside her always, part of her chemical makeup, part of her bones.

So Neela has plenty to report, actually. She just doesn't think she has the words.

"No," she says. "I'm fine. Just give my love to your boys, is all."

"Will do," Abby responds after a moment. "Give my love to yours."

*

On Saturday night they go for dinner with another one of the surgical attendings and her husband. Nice people--the guy's in plastics, whatever that means, but he played bass in a jazz trio in college and it's easy to talk music. It's good. Neela looks happy. Ray tries not to make himself crazy trying to figure out if she actually likes it here or she's just faking, but he thinks if there are people she wants to hang out with that's probably an okay sign, right?

Right.

It was crowded when they got there and he parked far away from the restaurant, under a tree. When she shuts the passenger door she gives him this _look _and a minute later she's in his lap in the driver's seat, her skirt around her waist, and God. God.

"Can I tell you something?" she asks him, when it's over. She's got her arms snaked around his neck, her forehead on his shoulder. Every time he scratches her back she shivers a little, so he keeps doing it. "Sex with you is...not boring."

Ha. He tilts his head to the side, trying to see her face. "You sound surprised over there, kiddo."

"Well, no, no, I mean, I've always liked sex. Sex is brilliant. Sex is...sex. Just..." Neela sits back a little, pushing her hair out of her face. She looks sort of embarrassed. "I always felt a bit like I'd rather be transplanting someone's liver. Or watching really good TV."

Ray wills himself not to burst out laughing. "Watching TV?"

"Well, not _reruns_. Not any old rubbish. But like, sweeps week television."

"I see." Sweeps week. He can't laugh. He really, really can't laugh.

"Oh, go ahead, have yourself a giggle." Neela sighs. "I don't know. I thought maybe I was a tiny bit frigid."

Ray takes in her ruddy cheeks, her bitten lips. Her legs are still splayed on either side of him: they just did it in a parking lot, for Christ's sake. In the weird green glow of the dashboard lights it's possible she's the hottest thing he's ever seen. "Nope," he manages. "I'm pretty sure that wasn't the problem."

"Well. You'll be pleased to know that I'm hardly ever wondering what's on HBO when we're together."

"Hardly ever." He smirks. "You'll be pleased to know that I have DVR."

"That is a relief." She eases off him, settling herself back into the passenger seat and raising her hips to tug her skirt back down where it belongs. "Now you have to tell me something humiliating. It's only fair."

He considers for a moment, and then he just blurts it out, sitting in the car outside a seafood joint in Baton Rouge. "I didn't have sex with somebody I loved 'til I was thirty-one."

Neela gets very still. Ray thinks of the last time he said it to her, in the hospital at Northwestern, how he'd meant it to make her feel as shitty as humanly possible. How he'd wanted it to feel like a slap in the face and from the look in her eyes he knew it had. "Ray," she begins, and he doesn't know why but in this moment he just feels like he should let her off the hook.

"Also once in college I got really wasted and threw up on a chick in bed."

That stops her; her eyes go wide and incredulous. "Are you serious?"

"Nope." Ray smiles crookedly, and puts the car in drive.

*

Baton Rouge isn't much of a walking city, but there's a park not too far from the hospital. Sometimes they'll get ice cream and meader over for awhile after work. She's never liked holding someone's hand in public before. Tonight there's a little league game going on, boys of seven or eight careening around the diamond as fast as their small legs will carry them. Neela stops for a moment, watching.

"You ready?" Ray wants to know. He sounds uncomfortable, his voice a little tight. He lets go of her hand. She's about to laugh at him, make some crack about her biological clock, but when she follows his gaze she sees a dark-haired woman in a baseball cap peering back at her. They make eye contact briefly, so briefly, but it's long enough for the woman to shoot Neela the kind of look she hasn't gotten since the apartment, when girls would stumble sleepy-eyed out of Ray's bedroom in the morning to find her eating Lucky Charms in her pajamas. _Who the fuck are you?_ they always seemed to be asking.

_I'm no one, _Neela always wanted to reply.

"Did you date that woman?" she asks, though she already knows he did. He has the good manners to look embarrassed. They are walking back toward the hospital parking lot; Neela tosses her melty, half-eaten cone into the trash.

"Yeah." Ray nods. He's never been evasive. "Her kid plays on that team, I think. I would have introduced you, but I, uh, broke up with her kind of suddenly."

Neela stares at him. "You dated a woman with a child?"

"For a couple of months, yeah."

"You dated a woman with a child old enough to play _little league_?"

"I think it's tee ball."

"Whatever." Neela does not know what to do with that information. There is no reason why it should make her so upset. "Wow," she manages. "I mean. Wow."

"What?" Ray looks at her closely, tilting his head to the side. "Are you pissed?"

"No." She's not. She wishes, bizarrely, that she had a corner to stand in, somewhere to press her back. They are crossing the parking garage. He drove her today.

"You are! You're pissed." He looks sort of amused, which is irritating, like everything about her is absurd. "Why are you pissed?"

"I just said I'm not." A thought occurs to her. "When did you break up?" she asks, and Ray looks directly at her face.

"When I thought you might be coming."

Well.

They go back to his apartment. He offers to cook, but she's spoiled her dinner with ice cream, as if she's four years old. She's in a terrible mood. She wants to pepper him with more questions about the woman from the park, if Ray knew her son, if they did things together, how many months are a couple. If that's where he went at Thanksgiving. Neela doesn't ask any of that, of course, because saying it out loud would make her sound completely batty, so instead she sits in front of a _Simpsons_ rerun, sulking. She hates feeling jealous. It's so base. _Neela_, her mother would say, and she'd be right, _this is beneath you._

"I think I'm going to sleep at my place tonight," she tells him when the show is over, because she is the worst, smallest, most petty person in the world.

"Really?" Ray is sitting at the kitchen table paging through _The American Journal of Orthopedics, _and he looks up in what appears to be surprise. Of course he'd be reading that right now, playing responsible doctor while she sits here in front of cartoons. It just figures.

"Yeah." She stands up, not meeting his gaze. "You know, I'm paying for it, and I never spend any time there, and--"

"Do you even have a bed?"

That annoys her. "Of course I have a bed," she snaps. "I didn't come here expecting you to put me up."

"Okay." Ray gives her this look like she is so full of shit he can't even stand it, but in the end he just nods. "Whatever you want to do."

"All right." So she goes around the apartment picking up things she thinks she'll need for the night: her toothbrush, the face wash out of the shower. All her clothes are here. He's still sitting at the table reading, or pretending to. Either way his calmness is infuriating. She goes into the kitchen--she bought a giant tub of expensive Greek yogurt yesterday, and she'll be damned if she's going to leave it here for him to eat--and she opens the door of the refrigerator with such force she dislodges a magnet, sending a couple of takeout menus and the phone number of someone called Lucille fluttering to the lino. She tries several times with no success to stick them all back up there before finally she gives up, turning around and looking at him. "I'm being stupid," she says.

Ray shrugs, pushing the magazine away. "A little bit."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay." He scrapes his chair back and she goes to him like an instinct, settling herself in his lap. Neela wonders how many times he is going to have to forgive her, and after that she wonders if he ever really will.

*

Ray feels restless, like he's got all this excess energy, so instead of begging off when Bryan asks if he's up for some basketball, he grabs his stuff out of his locker and gets to it. In his life before Neela got here Ray was the kind of guy who did stuff with other dudes after work, and he's been trying to figure out how much of it to keep up and how much of it to bail on. If he's being honest with himself, instead of a run to the port or beers at one of the bars near the hospital, he wants to get home and see her--still, he doesn't want to be that guy.

Frankly, Ray's been having a bitch of a time figuring out which guy he does want to be.

Here's the thing: he's been with a lot of girls. Not, like, a gross number--not like Charlie Sheen or somebody--but enough so that he knows what he's doing. He understands relationships, for the most part. More that anything he understands sex.

Except that suddenly he doesn't.

It's not a technique thing--he's pretty confident in his technique, thanks--but he just, he's never--with Neela he feels _shy_. Disarmed, somehow. The first time he came inside her he actually shook a little, his breathing weird and ragged, like there was something in his lungs. Ray thinks of this dog they had when he was a kid, a mutt named Mudslide Slim who wanted so desperately to be touched that he trembled whenever you'd pet him. Even at ten, Ray always felt kind of sorry for the poor bastard: that kind of naked need only gets you hurt in the end.

Ray's just trying to maintain.

It's miserably hot out here, even at seven-thirty. They keep predicting rain. Ray steals the ball from Bryan, wiping sweat off his forehead with the inside of his upper arm. He thinks at some point he and Neela are going to have to talk about the Big Things, but honestly he's so glad to just have her here, is still so surprised every time he walks in the door and she hasn't peaced out, that he doesn't want to push it. Gift horse, and all that.

"You're a pussy, Barnett," Bryan tells him, as the ball sails over his head, and Ray has to agree.

*

Today was the first day since Neela started at the hospital that was really awful, seven hours to repair a series of puncture wounds to the lungs of a fourteen-year-old only to have her code on the table. They don't scrub out until nine-thirty, and all she wants to do take a shower and crash, but she's got a message from Ray wanting her to meet him at this bar down the street from his apartment that has live music every night. She thinks about passing, but she knows how important it is to him that she likes it here, how closely he watches her for any sign that she's about to cut and run. He doesn't entirely trust her, and it's not his fault. She wouldn't trust her either, if she were him.

She doesn't entirely trust herself.

So Neela changes her clothes, packs up a day's worth of rubble from the couch in her office. She tries to work the kink from her ponytail out of her hair, but when that doesn't work she just throws it up again. May rent is due. She writes a check at the desk, drops it in the mail on her way out the door. It smells like a storm.

She makes a wrong turn on her way out of the hospital and gets lost again: it takes her fifteen minutes to reorient herself, and another ten to get where she's going. She's so annoyed. Honestly, this place is three blocks from Ray's apartment, and she doesn't know why she keeps making these idiotic directional mistakes.

She gets inside and finds him leaning halfway over the bar, chatting quietly with the exquisitely gorgeous bartender. He's doing that sideways head-tilt thing he does, the one that makes all the girls fall in love with him. The band is banging away in the corner. For the love of God.

Finally Ray glances up and sees her: their gaze catches, and he flashes her a guilty grin. Neela sighs. She's not even mad, really. But she's exhausted and her hair is bad and it hasn't been cooler than ninety degrees since she moved here, and the enormity of all of this, of the last four weeks and the last four years, is roiling up at her with such force that in this moment Neela thinks she might combust. It's like there is no air in all of Baton Rouge, much less in this stupid bar.

"Hey," he says, still smiling, coming towards her. Neela thinks, dully and not for the first time, that she rather likes his new gait. It suits him, if such a thing is possible. It draws attention to his hips. "You came."

"Yeah," she manages. She doesn't know why she feels like she's about to burst into tears. "Just to say hi. I'm actually on my way home."

"Oh." His forehead wrinkles. "Home meaning...?"

"You know, that's a very good question, Ray." He looks completely bewildered, and Neela shakes her head; she hates this, all of it, having her belly exposed in this goddamn miserable way. "Look, I'm not trying to ruin your good time. That's not why I came here."

"What?" he asks. " Neela, what's wrong?"

"Nothing. Nothing." She shakes her head again. "I'll see you later, all right?"

"Neela."

The band keeps playing as she walks out the door.

*

Ray doesn't spend a whole lot of time anymore wishing his legs were better, but fuck she's walking fast. It takes him a minute to catch up. The heat is heavy and oppressive; he can hear thunder rolling in off the water. "Neela," he says, when he reaches her car. She's digging through that enormous bag she always carries, looking for her car keys. "That wasn't--" He's about to say _what it looked like_, but first of all that's the stupidest thing that could possibly come out of his mouth and second of all it's a lie. It was exactly what it looked like. He was flirting with the bartender. Ray always flirts with the bartender. He flirts with the bartender and the checkout girl and chick who pours his coffee at Starbucks. He doesn't mean anything by it. "Anything. Sorry."

"Are you serious about me?"

Ray stares. He just hallucinated, he must have. "Am I _what_?"

"You heard me."

"Yeah, I heard you." He swallows. "I've been serious about you for three years."

"So you say, except that in between that was every groupie in Chicago and Katey Alvaro and the woman with the kid and all the other pretty girls I don't know about--"

Whoa, _whoa_. "That's bullshit, Neela." He's surprised by how upset that just made him, how fucking unfair it feels. "You didn't want to be with me. You really want to go through a list of all the people you were with before now? You want to talk about Gates, or that guy Brenner? Also, I seem to remember something about you being _married_--"

"Don't." She cuts him off, which is probably a good thing. "You had a girlfriend at Halloween, did you not?"

Ray exhales. They never talked about it again after that weird phone conversation, when she hinted around about wanting to come for Thanksgiving. And technically no, he didn't have a girlfriend when he came to visit, but fuck if she's going to let him off on a technicality. "I was dating somebody on and off."

"Then you were not serious about me!"

He's about to lose his shit in another second. He plants his hands on the roof of the car, one on either side of her. "I'm serious about you now."

"Get off me." She pushes past him, and it feels like a kick in the lungs. "I am so _jealous_," she says, sounding frankly outraged. "My God. It's awful. Of course you had a life before I got here. You had a life in Chicago. I know that. I'm not a total idiot. But every time I think about you with someone else I want to jump off a bridge. I hate feeling like this. I just, I hate it."

"Well, then, you know how it feels." He turns around and looks at her, his back against the door. Lightning cracks somewhere off in the distance; Ray smells gunpowder and heat. When he speaks his voice is quiet. "I told you I love you, Neela. I told you twice."

That pisses her off. "First of all, it doesn't count if you say that to someone to hurt them," she snaps, laying into him with enthusiasm. "Second of all, it doesn't count if you say that to someone and don't give them a chance to say it back."

Ray goes very still. "Do you _want_ to say it back?"

Neela looks at him as if he has brain damage. "Of course I want to say it!" she explodes. "Jesus Christ. I'm here, aren't I?"

Well.

Ray sags back against the door of the car, running a hand over his bristly head. What a moron. What an idiot he is. "Yeah," he says, and he thinks it gets lost under the sound of the thunder but she's coming back to him now, bracing her hands on his chest. "You are."

"I love you," she says, looking right at him. Her hair is falling out of its ponytail, coming down in pieces around her face. "I'm sorry that it took me so long to make sense of it. I'm stupid about these kinds of things, and it's difficult for me, and I'm so--_frightened_, but I do. I love you. So please stop protecting yourself from me."

"Neela, I'm not--"

"You are," she says, and he can't even argue. "But you don't have to. If you want me to keep my own place, take things slowly, that's fine, but it's just important to me that you know--"

"Wait a second." Ray blinks. "I'm dying for you to move in with me. I thought you didn't want to."

"I want to," she says, and she's clutching at his t-shirt a little bit, hanging on like she might actually need him as much as he needs her. "I want to. I came here to live with you."

"Okay," he says. He takes a deep breath: it's starting to rain, finally, fat drops landing on her cheeks and eyelids. "Then let's go home."

They left the AC on all day and it's freezing in the bedroom; outside, the thunder is fierce. One thing about living in Louisiana is that the weather's not a joke down here--Ray thinks of clashing fronts and hurricanes, of shit that's more powerful than you ever expected it to be. That could kill you if you aren't careful. He doesn't turn a light on before he presses her against the wall, his lips on her neck, her chin, her ear. She yanks at his shirt, goosebumps rising on his chest.

Neela grips his face in her hands and kisses him hard, then turns him around and kneels down in front of him, working the button fly on his dark jeans. Oh Jesus Christ. "Neela," he grinds out. "You don't have to--" He's going to say _prove anything_, but she's got him in her mouth and he can't make a single word. He can't--he can't.

"Shh. Ray," she says, and her breath is warm against his thighs. "Just let me."

So he lets her, one hand in her soft hair, pulling the rubber band all the way out. He tries not to move. When he absolutely can't take it one more second he hauls her to her feet, walking her backwards towards the bed, his hands cupping her face. "You're amazing," he tells her, practically babbling, his tongue finding hers. "Seriously. Neela. You're incredible." He pulls off her t-shirt, unhooks her bra, and when he grazes his thumbs across her chest she makes a low keening noise. He still can't get over the idea that he's the one doing this to her, coaxing those sounds from her throat. He wants to touch her everywhere. He traces her vertebrae, runs his hands over her stomach, and when he slides them down into those little shorts she wears she's so fucking ready it almost ends him right there.

"In the bed," he manages. "Sweetheart. In the bed."

Neela pulls back the covers, slithers out of her jeans; in a flicker of lightning the long line of her back seems to glow. He sits on the edge of the mattress to pull off the prosthetics which like, whatever, he's done in front of her before, but still there's always that hesitation, that moment like _this is what my body is_. He hedges for a fraction of a second, but when he glances over his shoulder at her--not for reassurance exactly, except yeah, for reassurance--she's not even paying attention, nipping at the nape of his neck. Neela is a biter. He loves her so much.

He lays back on his elbows and watches as she climbs on top of him, her thighs canted open over his. She teases for a second, brushing against him and pulling back; her body is radiating a slick kind of heat. "You with me?" he asks, and he sounds a little desperate for her but for once he thinks maybe that's okay.

"Yeah." She grins at him as she slides down; her hand finds his and squeezes. "I'm with you."

*

The sex is actually rather fantastic, is the truth, the pads of his thumbs in the dip beneath her hipbones, the salt at the base of his neck. He groans a little as she settles herself above him, shifting her weight, and Neela smiles into his shoulder. Being with Ray makes her feel powerful.

They go slow at first. It's storming like mad outside, lightning streaking through the sky--Neela can see actual bolts of it through the window, which she's only ever witnessed once or twice before. It's loud as the El back in Chicago, sounds more like hail than rain: everything is amplified, here. Her own breathing echoes in her head.

She starts moving more quickly, coasting up and down the length of him, his teeth leaving tiny marks across her shoulder. Part of her always knew they'd be compatible this way, that restless thrill in her stomach every time he pushed her out of the path of an oncoming gurney or flopped his lean limbs next to her on the couch, unsettling, like her body was so far ahead of her heart. Years later and at last they're keeping pace with one another; Neela rocks harder, faster, and when she comes he rides it out with her, holding her so tight.

"Uh oh," he says later, his body curled behind her like a shell, and she looks over her shoulder in sleepy alarm.

"What?"

He pushes against her, chest flush against her back. "What if we don't hit it off as roommates?"

"Loser." She elbows him a little. "We don't hit it off as roommates, actually."

"Well, that's true," he concedes. "You're a total slob."

"None of your friends ever bathe."

"You have terrible taste in music."

"Excuse me," she says, rolling over to face him. The rain has tapered off a bit, a steady drum on the windowpanes. "My taste in music is beyond reproach."

Ray smirks. "I think you mean 'beyond repair'."

"Bite your tongue." They lie there for a moment, looking at each other, looking. She feels she'll never get tired of his face. "I think we're probably going to have a lot of troubles," she says after a moment, and she's half-expecting him to disagree with her but in the end he just nods.

"Yeah," he says. "I think we probably are."

Neela moves closer, resting her head on the plane of his chest, and for once she's not afraid.


End file.
